Main Protagonists in the Origins of AIDS Debate

Adapted from The River

Danish scientist and principal researcher into
HIV-2 in Guinea-Bissau.

Professor Margaret Agerholm

Oxford-based virologist who wrote to the BMJ
questioning the safety of the CHAT vaccine trials in the Congo.

Professor Jan Albert

virologist at the Swedish Institute for Infectious Disease Control.

Professor Jennifer Alexander

South African microbiologist and proponent of OPV/AIDS theory.

Professor Steve Alexander

scientist at Biotech Research Inc., Rockville, Maryland,
who developed a version of the Western blot assay.

Professor Jonathan Allan

microbiologist and SIV expert working at the Southwest
Foundation for Biomedical Research, San Antonio, Texas.

Lawrence K. Altman

medical writer for the New York Times.
Dr Armand André, former director of blood bank in Liege, Belgium,
who tested the bloods of 175 Lindi chimps in the fifties.

Professor L. J. André

former captain of the French colonial medical service based at
the Institute Pasteur in Brazzaville; vaccinated population around
Mitzic in Gabon with Lépine vaccine in 1957. Later, director of the
military institute of tropical medicine in Marseille.

Stewart Aston

former head of the virus and rickettsial vaccine production
laboratory, Lederle Laboratories.

Lederle virologist who took over as Cox's deputy after
Koprowski left in 1957.

Dr Michele Carbone

Italian scientist who linked SV40 and asbestos exposure to the
development of tumours such as mesothelioma.

David Carr

The 'Manchester sailor' who died in 1959 from an AIDS-like illness
characterised by PCP and CMV infections.

Dr Wilson Carswell

A Scottish surgeon who became a leading figure in the fight
against AIDS in Uganda.

Hubert Caubergh

Sanitary agent who participated in, and documented, the CHAT
vaccinations in Ruanda-Urundi between 1958 and 1960.

Dr Francis Charlton

Californian physician and father of a brain damaged child
(AAC) who was fed with a Koprowski polio vaccine in 1956 and whose
excreted virus was used as the basis for CHAT vaccine.

Dr Robert Colebunders

Belgian clinician from the Tropical Institute at Antwerp
who has conducted extensive AIDS research in the Congo.

Steve Connor

Science journalist who wrote exposé about the apparent David Carr
HIV-1 contamination for The Independent in 1995.

Dr André Courtois

Belgian physician, son of Ghislain Courtois.

Dr Ghislain Courtois

Belgian physician who headed the Laboratoire Médical de
Stanleyville throughout the fifties and who established Lindi Camp
in collaboration with Koprowski. Distributed OPV to different parts
of the Congo and Ruanda-Urundi, and later helped organise
vaccination campaigns with Sabin's OPV in Belgium itself.

Professor Herald Cox

Head of viral and rickettsial research at Lederle Laboratories,
American Cyanamid, between the forties and sixties.

John Crewdson

Renowned Chicago Tribune journalist.

Julian Cribb

Australian scientific journalist and author of 'The White Death', the
first book to discuss the OPV/AIDS hypothesis in detail.

Professor James Curran

Effective head of the CDC's AIDS program from 1981
(when it was known as the Task Force on Kaposi's Sarcoma and Opportunistic
Infections) until 1995 (when it was known as the Division of HIV/AIDS); US
assistant surgeon-general, 1991-1995.

Michael Kent Curtis

Tom's brother; a professor of law from Wake University who
wrote a lengthy paper about the legal implications of the OPV/AIDS
controversy and the suppression of dissent.

Tom Curtis

American journalist and author of Rolling Stone article entitled 'The
Origin of AIDS'.

Head of virology at Leuven University and Rega
Institute, Leuven from the 1950s onwards; co-founder of RIT
(Recherche et Industrie Thérapeutif).

Brigadier Antonio De Spinola

Portugese governor of Guinea-Bissau between 1968 and 1973.

Professor Friedrich ('Fritz') Deinhardt

Worked under the Henles at the virology department of the
Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) in the fifties; conducted
hepatitis studies at Lindi Camp in 1958.

Professor Jean Deinhardt

British virologist who joined the Wistar Institute in 1959
and who married Fritz Deinhardt soon afterwards.

Dr Jean Delville

Belgian virologist based at Elisabethville, Congo, in the
fifties.

Professor Jan Desmyter

Head of virology, Rega Institute, Leuven, Belgium.

Professor Ronald Desrosiers

Harvard virologist based at the New England Primate
Research Center; member of the Wistar's expert committee looking into the
OPV/AIDS theory and a leading proponent of using live vaccines against AIDS.

60 year old Japanese-Canadian who died of typical AIDS-like
infections in Montreal in 1945.

Agnes Flack

Medical director of Clinton Farms, the women's prison in New Jersey;
helped with the Ruzizi field-trial of CHAT in 1958.

Professor Alan Fleming

Hematologist and AIDS epidemiologist.

Professor Tom Folks

Head of retroviral research at the Centers for Disease Control.

Dr Michel Forro

Hungarian doctor who worked for Vicicongo, the construction and
haulage parastatal based at Aketi, Congo; officially oversaw the
first mass trial of Koprowski's vaccines in 1957.

Professor Cecil Fox

American pathologist and tissue culture expert formerly with
the National Institutes of Health.

Professor John Fox

Virologist from Tulane University, New Orleans, who provided
poliovirus isolates which were used as the basis for several polio
vaccine strains, including Fox [poliovirus type 3] and P-712
[poliovirus type 2].

Professor Thomas Francis

Jonas Salk's former teacher who helped organize the
first IPV trials in the US.

Dr Alvin Friedman-Kein

New York physician who recognised high incidence of
Kaposi's Sarcoma in American gay men and co-authored first report on
KS in 1981.

Dr Stig Froland

Norwegian physician and AIDS specialist.

Professor Patricia Fultz

American virologist based at Birmingham, Alabama, who
reported on altered pathogenicity of SIVs after transfer into new
hosts.

28 year old engineer and former marine who died of AIDS-like
illnesses in Memphis, Tennessee in 1952.

Professor Carleton Gajdusek

Nobel Laureate for his work on the prion disease,
kuru. According to Preston Marx, Gajdusek may have played a crucial
role in the spread of Simian AIDS in American primate research centers.

Professor Robert Gallo

The first to isolate a human retrovirus, HTLV-I. He also
isolated HIV (after Montagnier and Levy) but called it HTLV-III,
thereby inaccurately implying that it was from the same family of
retroviruses as HTLV-I and HTLV-II. Friend of Hilary Koprowski.

Feng Gao

Virologist and PCR expert who provides sequences for Beatrice Hahn's
team in Birmingham, Alabama.

Professor Sven Gard

Swedish virologist and developer of an improved IPV, used in
Sweden since the 1950s.

Dr John Garrett

Virologist at the National Institute for Biologic Standards and
Control, Potters Bar, U.K, who conducted experiments suggesting that
there was little risk of oral polio vaccines becoming contaminated
with SIVs.

Laurie Garrett

Journalist and author of 'The Coming Plague'.

Professor Robert Garry

Microbiologist from Tulane University, New Orleans, who
found HIV in autopsy samples from Robert R.

Professor James Gear

Senior virologist at the South African Institute for Medical
Research; developer of South African oral polio vaccine in African
green monkey tissues and long term associate of Hilary Koprowski.

Professor Henry Gelfand

Virologist from Tulane University, New Orleans, who
carried CHAT vaccine from Brussels to Leopoldville for the 1958
vaccination campaign in the latter city.

Professor Paul Gigase

Belgian physician who worked at Katana Hospital, eastern
Congo, in the fifties and who, in the eighties, carried out studies

of KS and AIDS in the same region.

Professor Charles Gilks

Parasitologist who proposed theory that the AIDS epidemic
originated from malaria research which involved injecting monkey and
ape blood into humans.

Professor Sergio Giunta

Italian virologist who proposed that AIDS could have
come about through the increased capture of African monkeys for
scientific research.

Cambridge-based virologist and proponent of the theory that
the AIDS epidemic began with monkey-related sexual practices in
central Africa; also proposed an amplification role for reusable
needles in the advent of the epidemic.

Dr Olen Kew

Polio expert and director of molecular virology at the Division of
Virological Diseases, CDC.

Leonard Kopf

The first patient to be diagnosed with Kaposi's Sarcoma, 1867.

Dr Irena Koprowska

Married Hilary Koprowski in Poland in 1938 and in 1997
wrote a revealing autobiography entitled 'A Woman Wanders through
Life and Science'.

Belgian mine official who worked in the Congo, and who died of
AIDS-like diseases in 1977.

John Maddox

Former editor of Nature magazine who declined to publish Bill
Hamilton's submission on the OPV/AIDS controversy.

Edna Mahan

Governor of the women's prison at Clinton Farms for forty years,
including the period of the Koprowski vaccine trials.

Dr Brian Mahy

British virologist, director of the CDC's division of viral and
rickettsial diseases.

Professor Jonathan Mann

American physician; head of Projêt SIDA in Kinshasa in
the early eighties and head of the WHO's Global Program on AIDS from
1986 to 1990. Killed in plane crash in 1998.

Maria

Rwanda-born HIV-infected wife of Daniel D.

Professor Brian Martin

Sociologist of science who heads Science and Technology
Studies at the University of Wollongong, Australia; publisher of
Louis Pascal's paper: "What Happens When Science Goes Bad?"

Professor Preston Marx

American primatologist and expert in HIV/SIV research;
frequent visitor to West Africa; representative of the Aaron Diamond
AIDS research Center at LEMSIP (the Laboratory for Experimental
Medicine and Surgery In Primates).

Trained at the CDC Epidemiology Intelligence Service
(EIS) and who followed Stanley Plotkin to the Wistar Institute,
where he organized several polio vaccine trials.

Louis Pascal

Philosopher and arm-chair researcher; founding father of OPV/AIDS
theory.

Professor Louis Pasteur

French veterinary scientist, developer of first vaccine
against rabies and in whose honour the Pasteur Institutes found in
Francophone countries around the world are named.

Dr Stéphane Pattyn

Worked at Laboratoire Médical d'Elisabethville under Jean
Delville in the fifties and staged polio antibody studies around the
Belgian Congo; now an eminent virologist at the Tropical Institute
in Antwerp.

Julian Peetermans

Joined RIT at its inception in 1956 and effectively headed
vaccine production there until the nineties.

Dr Martine Peeters

Virologist at the Institute of Tropical Medicine in Antwerp,
Belgium; specialist in research on SIV-positive chimpanzees.

Robert and Joan Phillips

Husband-and-wife photographer and journalist team who
reported on the Ruzizi vaccinations in March 1958.

Dr Tony Pinching

London-based immunologist and AIDS researcher.

Professor Peter Piot

Aids researcher and latterly head of UNAIDS, the United
Nations AIDS program.

Professor Stanley Plotkin

Koprowski's former associate at the Wistar Institute and,
in the nineties, managing director of Pasteur Merieux, the
pharmaceutical giant.

Dr Anne-Grethe Poulsen

Danish specialist in HIV-2 research who worked with
Peter Aaby in Guinea-Bissau.

Dr Edmund Preston

Quaker physician from Moorestown, New Jersey, who helped
organise the first small-scale US trial of Koprowski vaccines in the
open community.

Professor Abel Prinzie

Belgian virologist who worked at the Rega Institute from
1954 and later, in the sixties, at RIT.

Professor F. ("Smithy") Przesmycki

Head of virology at the state institute of
hygiene, Warsaw, who collaborated on the Polish trials of CHAT and
Fox.

22-year-old secretary who died of Pneumocystis carinii in 1964 in Pulman,
Washington.

Professor Albert Sabin

Virologist who developed a set of oral polio vaccines which,
since 1961, have been adopted around the world.

Dr Carl-Rune Salenstedt

Director of vaccine production at the National
Bacteriological Laboratories, Stockholm, Sweden.

Professor Jonas Salk

Virologist who developed an inactivated polio vaccine which
was administered to millions in Britain and America, before being
superseded by Sabin's oral vaccine.

Dr Kingsley Sanders

British tissue culture specialist who worked for the Medical
Research Council in the fifties and sixties and who investigated the
suitability of African monkey kidneys for polio vaccine preparation.

Professor Carl Saxinger

Conducted AIDS research under Robert Gallo at the
National Cancer Institute, Bethesda, in the eighties.

Professor Meinrad Schar

Chief of sera and vaccines at the Swiss Public Health
Department; helped organize trials of several OPVs and IPVs in the
fifties and sixties.

Dr Barry Schoub

Senior virologist at National Institute of Virology, South Africa.

Dr Gordon Scott

British vet, formerly based at Muguga, Kenya, who visited
Jezierski at Gabu-Nioka in 1954.

John Seale

British venereologist who proposed theories that AIDS epidemic might
have originated through Cold War biological weapons research or
through inceased availability of reusable needles and syringes in
central Africa.

Dr Jacob and Lilli Segal

East German husband-and-wife team who proposed theory
that American biological weapons research sparked AIDS epidemic.

Professor Paul Sharp

British molecular biologist who has written extensively on
HIV and SIV.

Randy Shilts

San Francisco-based journalist and author of And The Band Played On.
Died of early AIDS in the early nineties.

Dr Joseph Smadel

Chief of viral and rickettsial research at the Walter Reed Army
Medical Center in the fifties; later the associate director of the
US Public Health Service.

Professor Smorodintsev

Soviet virologist who participated in the testing of the
Sabin vaccine strains in the USSR.

Eva Lee Snead

San Antonio physician, debarred, who wrote Some Call It "AIDS" -
I Call It Murder!, which proposes that AIDS came from
SV40-contaminated IPV.

Dr John Snow

Medic whose pioneering epidemiological investigation into the
London cholera outbreak of 1854 led to the cessation of the epidemic.

Professor Jean Sonnet

Belgian physician based at Lovanium University Hospital,
Leopoldville/Kinshasa, in fifties and sixties; pioneering AIDS
researcher until his death in 1992.

Dr Fred Stare

Nutrition expert from Harvard University who received chimpanzees
from Lindi camp.

Dr Tom Starzl

Controversial scientist from University of Pittsburgh and leading
proponent of xenotransplantation - in this case, transplanting
baboon livers into humans.

Professor Ernest Sternglass

American physicist who proposed theory that low-level
radiation exposure was the principal causative factor behind the
AIDS epidemic.

Dr Jan Stijns

Director of the medical laboratory at the Tropical Institute in
Leopoldville who may have been responsible for collecting L70, the
first HIV positive blood sample, in 1959.

Professor Joseph Stokes Jr

Quaker who headed pediatric department of Children's
Hospital of Philadelphia in the fifties; collaborated on Koprowski's
polio vaccine trials. Later appointed director of CHOP.

Robert and Theodore Strecker

Right-wing American AIDS activists who proposed
that the Soviets and the WHO had produced the AIDS virus as a
biological weapon.

Dr Trevor Stretton

Senior house officer at the Manchester Royal Infirmary in the
fifties; tended to David Carr.

Dr Raphael Stricker

San Francisco immunologist who co-wrote articles on
OPV/AIDS with Blaine Elswood.

Dr Wolf Szmuness

Polish émigré virologist who pioneered studies of the hepatitis B
vaccine, Heptavax-B, in the US and elsewhere in the late seventies
and early eighties.

British researcher who monitored Tutsi refugees in Tanzania in
the early sixties.

Professor Jozef Vandepitte

Chair of microbiology at the University of Lovanium in
the Belgian Congo in 1959, when he helped Arno Motulsky collect
blood samples. Temporarily headed the Laboratoire Médical de
Stanleyville in 1958.

Professor Michel Vandeputte

Established the first virology laboratory in
Leopoldville in 1956 and moved to the Rega Institute, Leuven in
1960.

Dr Bernard Vandercam

Belgian AIDS physician who took over from Dr Jean
Sonnet at St Luc Hospital, Brussels, in 1992.